Talk:werman

RFV discussion: February–April 2019

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werman

Middle English:

1. A male human

Looks like an attempt to reconstruct a parallel to wifman

I'm not attempting anything; it was the historical parallel to wifman:

Old English used wer and wif to distinguish the sexes, but wer began to disappear late 13c. and was replaced by man.

And just as today we say 'menfolk' and 'womenfolk' when we want to distinguish between the sexes, the Anglo-Saxons said 'werman' and 'wifman,' that is, male (wer) human being and female (wif) human being.

--Go-Chlodio (talk) 14:42, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

@Go-Chlodio: if "the Anglo-Saxons" said it, the term should be listed as Old English (ang), not Middle English (enm). That said, however, {{R:ang:BT}} has no entry for a wer(e)man(n) or wer(e)mon(n) or any other likely variant spelling. The book you linked to was not written by a linguist or lexicographer, and I suspect they've simply confused wer with wǣpnedmann. Their point, that Old English mann was not specifically male, is correct; but their example of the specifically male word is apparently mistaken. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:37, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

I mean, wifman is listed as Middle English. I don't why the datebase doesn't list it. You also disregarded etymyonline, also it is mentioned in this article. --Go-Chlodio (talk) 18:14, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Like I said, this seems to be an attempt (albeit not by you) at extrapolating from wer and wif to compounds of wer and wif. It makes perfect sense, and I'm sure Old-English and Middle-English speakers would have understood perfectly what it meant- but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that any such speakers ever said the word. Judging from my search in the MED database for w*m*n*, they would have responded to a question about the word with something equivalent to "Did you mean wepman?"

I'm guessing that wepman disappeared because its variants overlapped too much with those of womman. If werman had ever existed, I'm sure the same thing would have happened to it, so "werman" would be a perfectly acceptable hypothesis for a lexicographer to make- but hypotheses aren't facts. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:32, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

I can't find any mention of "werman" at the Online Etymology Dictionary. —Mahāgaja · talk 20:23, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

• RFV failed. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:19, 7 April 2019 (UTC)